Modern Ghosts
by Beta Whims
Summary: After reuniting, Bucky and Steve end up back in Brooklyn. There's enough different about living in the future that accepting the changes in their lives doesn't require much adjustment, and there are some things that don't change no matter what time it is.


After two years chasing a person that didn't officially exist, Steve Rogers had found his ghost. Of course, there were legal problems with coming back from the dead. Like, for instance, officially existing made it easier for people to find him.

So, Bucky remained a ghost, and Steve got to have a haunted house.

The apartment was much nicer than anything they'd been used to living in before. Most city buildings in 1945 hadn't been terribly comfortable. When they'd had barracks the beds had been better than the ground, but not by much. Bucky's idea of interior design for the past two years had been newspaper on the windows, and Steve was positive wherever Hydra had kept the Winter Soldier hadn't been designed with comfort in mind. So, the bar wasn't set terribly high to begin with.

Although rent had hiked sky-high, Steve had been able to pick up as much furniture as he needed from the store, and thanks to the internet, "the store" could be anywhere.

All in all, thanks to a comfortable couch, a sturdy wood table he may have bought more for tactical reasons involving guns than actual appearance, and whatever other assorted furniture he needed, it wasn't a terrible place to be holed up.

Cable television and Netflix, combined with seventy years of television and movies, meant Bucky certainly wasn't left at a loss for things to watch. Combine it with the internet and nearly a century of information, and they both found things to occupy themselves for hours without ever needing to leave the apartment.

If they both stayed up past midnight because the life of a serum-enhanced super soldier trended that way for any number of reasons, including (but not limited to) an inability to sleep like a normal human being, and saving the world has never worked on a convenient 9-5 schedule, well, they had more than enough to keep them occupied, including each other.

Steve sat on the floor, back against the couch and foot propped up against the stand for the television. The charging cord for his laptop snaked its way across the floor to where the power strip glowed in the dark with a bright green light. It was their new sleepover setup, and included the longtime tradition of covering the floor in a layer of cushions.

"Hey, Steve," Bucky said, bumping Steve's shoulder with his knee from his position on the couch.

Steve looked up from his screen and turned to see the titled tablet Bucky used. "What's that?"

"I think they've made a meme of that face you make on fair rides." Sure enough, there was his face with the most unflattering expression taken during a mission somewhere, photoshopped into a million pictures. It took about two more seconds for Bucky to grin.

As Bucky clacked away on the screen, he tilted the screen away, and then purposefully hid it once Steve tried to look. "What's that for, Buck?"

"Aaaaaaaaand, posted."

Not even two seconds later, the notifications popped up on Steve's screen.

" _Nice face, Capsicle."_

" _You'd think someone who jumps out of planes without a parachute would handle teacups better."_

Muttering under his breath something along the lines of, "I know where you sleep, jerk," Steve clicked on the post.

Sure enough, there was his face, photoshopped onto some picture Bucky had stolen from the Disneyland website for the teacup ride, looking absolutely terrified.

He had the ability to heal from things and even walk away from things that killed most people, but it didn't stop him from getting hurt. Falling two stories through a glass roof hurt. Ditching a car at sixty miles an hour and the road rash hurt.

"It's not Coney Island," Bucky said, leaning over Steve shoulder to examine his work with a grin that Steve would have been irritated at if it had been say, Tony. "...But I think the mouse ears really capture the moment."

Steve couldn't help but chuckle, and clicked away to the wiki-walk that had become his go-to way of covering the past century when he was content to read up on whatever crossed his path.

"Oh, hey, what's that?" Bucky said, reaching over Steve's shoulder to point at the screen.

Since he was at the end of the article, Steve clicked on the blue hyperlink, and let the page load. Thanks to Stark Tech it took all the time for him to blink before it loaded. Which was impressively fast given the ramble Tony had given them, mentioning something about being unable to use the telephone and internet at the same time.

"Looks like an article on plums," Steve said, and then tilted his head to the right to stare at Bucky. "I think the internet would call you a troll."

"It's called a running gag," Bucky replied. "Or an inside joke," he added and held down his tablet with the definition on the screen so that Steve could see it from his spot on the floor.

"Yeah, well, thanks to the inside joke you share with the entire internet, there seems to be something to do with plums on every page that mentions you," Steve said, scanning the page about some variety of plums found in West Virginia. "How is that even possible?"

"Stark," Bucky answered without missing a beat. "I also get bored." After a moment, he sat up from reclining on the couch and leaned down again. "So what's the article about?"

"A recipe for plum cake."

"Complete with a novel's worth of story before you get to the actual recipe?"

"Hey, I like reading them, makes the internet more personal," Steve told him, and then stopped scrolling, "Look, this baker made this purple cake for her wedding." And to emphasize it, Steve showed Bucky the picture of the multi-tiered plum cake with two smiling brides next to it.

"If you want a wedding cake, Steve, you might wanna think about getting married," Bucky teased.

Steve shook his head and clicked off the page to continue reading about the change in growing zones due to climate change. "I think the time for that kind of stuff was left in the forties."

"You never seemed that interested in dating in the Forties," Bucky said, in a light tone that was an easy way into a joke, if Steve wanted to take that exit from the current topic.

Their late night conversations had a habit of turning melancholic or depressing quickly, and this time Steve was certain he could be blamed for this one.

He'd had the conversation once, with Peggy in the car, before he'd become Captain America, and the words he said then seemed applicable in the present day. Natasha had been trying to set him up since they met, and he smiled slightly when he remembered they had also talked about his lack of relationships in a car.

"Yeah, well, it never seemed all that important," Steve echoed himself.

It was true, but the excuse was also an easy way to explain that it just wasn't something he found himself interested in all that often.

"More important?" Bucky chuckled. He'd been the one setting Steve up on double dates, often with the excuse he needed to get out more.

"Yeah, Buck, more important things," Steve told him, and closed the screen on his laptop. "Things like the war, and then once I was defrosted, I had the Avengers." And finding Bucky once he knew his best friend was still alive.

Bucky didn't look like he was buying the excuse. It wasn't like he had listened before they went to Europe, or were in Europe, either.

"It's kind of hard to find people with shared life experience."

"Like being a displaced super soldier from the nineteen-forties?" Bucky asked.

"Yeah, like that," Steve started to say before he realized the question had probably been a rhetorical one, and that they both shared that one. Aside from whatever happened to Bucky while he was under Hydra's control, their entire life was a shared experience. "Sorry, Buck."

"Yeah, well then, it sounds like you'll just have to marry me, punk."

"Jeeze, Bucky, you could at least ask me out on a date first," Steve answered, parroting some line he'd heard during one of his many movie binge weekends.

Bucky gave Steve one of those looks that meant he'd accidentally mistaken something serious as a joke, before he leaned towards Steve with an earnest engagement in the conversation. "I'm serious, Steve. It's not like either of us are into the dating scene much. And you never were. But we've got each other, and don't have any plans to change that, so let's make it official."

When Steve did not say anything, Bucky slid off the couch and onto the floor beside him. "Think about it? We're already the most important people in each other's lives."

They would also have tax benefits, something that Tony had rambled on about with regards to Pepper, and the time when the idea of marrying for love rather than as a social, political, and economic business decisions wasn't far removed from his parent's generation.

"I don't mind coming back from the dead for this."

Steve had already risked his life to save Bucky in the middle of the Second World War, fought his programming at every turn, and then stood between Bucky and every government the world over. If he had no plans on keeping the jerk in his life as long as possible, he'd gone through a lot of trouble to pass up chances to get rid of him.

Steve reached out and grabbed Bucky's shoulder. "I'm with you 'til the end of the line."

"Good," Bucky said, and then yawned. "Now scoot over. It's way past bedtime."

Steve did so, and set his laptop out of the way so neither of them would trip over the cord in the morning, or more likely afternoon give the first digit on the clock had become a five at some point. They settled down in the roofless, wall-less, pillow fort next to each other, with Bucky's side pressed comfortably against Steve's. A gentle way to ground each other on nights when sleep was hard to come by. It was calming, being reminded that his house was haunted, that the ghosts of the nineteen-forties still inhabited the place.


End file.
